THE story of Prisoner of War, Eric Lomax, will hit cinemas next week, but there are few that know his first family, wife Nan, and daughters Charmaine and Linda, were left out of the film and his book.

WATCH The Railway Man when it hits cinemas next week and you’ll leave feeling you know all about the complicated, scarred individual at its centre.

Eric Lomax was tortured by the Japanese during World War II and eventually rescued from his torment through the love of his wife Patti.

But
there are three names you won’t hear during the film – those of Nan, Eric’s first wife, and his daughters Linda and Charmaine.

The
four of them were a family for 37 years yet they are completely missing
from the movie, which stars Colin Firth, Jeremy Irvine and Nicole Kidman.

Nan and Linda are now dead and Eric died, aged 93, last year. So when Charmaine attended the premiere in London last month, she got a few puzzled looks when she told people she was Eric’s daughter.

She said: “I could see them thinking, ‘Where do you fit into all this?’”

Charmaine, who lives in Edinburgh with
husband Henry, wasn’t sure whether she wanted to tell the story of how she fitted in – the story that is missing from the film of her dad’s life and yet integral to it.

But seeing The Railway Man has prompted her to do so because after she watched it, she felt as though the final piece of her lifelong mission to understand her father was being slotted into place.

Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman in The Railway Man

Charmaine
added: “On screen, I got to see him as a young man – as he was before I
met him, as he was even before he married my mum. Jeremy Irvine is so like my dad, it’s uncanny. What I saw for the first time was the man dad
should have been, the man he would have been if he hadn’t suffered in the terrible way that he did.”

That understanding has meant the end of a long journey to forgive her father.

That is an extraordinary feat because Charmaine,
Linda and Nan were victims of torture just as Eric was. While he was the victim of physical torture – in Burma he was waterboarded daily and kept at the point of death for weeks – his family were tortured secondhand for decades because of what it did to him and to their relationship.

When Charmaine was a child, one phrase
continually cropped up. She said: “I was forever being told, ‘Your dad was tortured’. But no one ever explained what tortured meant.”

The truth was that only Eric knew – and the only way he could survive was by burying it so deeply inside himself that he couldn’t communicate anything.

Charmaine added: “He had this armour and you could never get beneath it to find out what was really going on.

“My dad’s feelings were locked inside himself. He was there physically but emotionally he was 100 per cent absent.”

Eric was 20 when he joined the Royal Signals Corps and went to south-east Asia in
1941. In the months before he left, he had been going out with Nan in their native Edinburgh and on the eve of his departure they got engaged.

Less than a year later, he was captured by the Japanese after the surrender of Singapore. For the next three-and-a-half years, Nan waited, not knowing if he was alive or dead.

Eric, meanwhile, had been force-marched along with other British, Australian, Indian and Malay prisoners to the infamous concentration camp at Changi.

He
was later sent to Burma to work on the railway to Siam, now Thailand. Some of the prisoners built their own radio, which they used to follow the progress of the war.

But
in August 1943, they were caught. Ten men were arrested and severely beaten (two died). The remaining eight were then moved to a special prison for prolonged torture – and Eric was one of them.

Incredibly, he survived until the end of the war. One night in 1945, Nan, a devout Christian, had a dream in which she saw Eric emerging from a bright light. When she woke up, she felt certain that he would come home. A few months later, he did.

They
might have waited to get married but, while Eric was a POW, his mother had died and his father had remarried. Charmaine said: “Dad had nowhere to stay, so he moved in with my mum and her parents.”

Today, every professional he would have met
once he was home would have urged him not to rush into anything after his experience in captivity. But this was 1945.

An Army doctor checked his vital signs and told him to get on with his life. Three weeks later, Eric and Nan got married.

Charmaine
said: “My mum told me that on their first night together she rubbed cream into the sores on dad’s back and asked him what had happened.

“He said he didn’t want to talk about it and that she should never ask him again.”

Nan
never did ask again – Charmaine thinks she was too afraid. So they papered over what was a dark, fathomless chasm in their marriage and pretended all was well.

A year later, Linda was born. Then Eric, who now worked for the Colonial Office, was posted to west Africa to help build a 600-mile railway across what is now Ghana. While they were there, a second child arrived,
a boy who lived for four hours.

It was more than 40 years later, in 1995 – when the autobiography on which the film is based was published – that Nan and Charmaine learned from the dedication that Eric had named his dead son after himself.

That spoke volumes about the emotion locked inside the ex-soldier and about the lack of communication between Eric and Nan.

More telling was that, in the book, Nan and Charmaine were – in their view – airbrushed out of his life, with Nan referred to just as “S”.

Consequently, neither Nan nor Charmaine ever did more than dip into the book and never found out the details of his torture.

Even today, Charmaine says she doesn’t
think she could read the details and she could barely watch the scenes in the film that show how he was treated.

The Lomaxes returned from Africa in 1955 and Charmaine was born two years later. They lived in Edinburgh and Eric worked as a lecturer
at Strathclyde University. But the chasm in their marriage was too big and too deep to be ignored. Eric spent unexplained time away from the family and was unable to deal with ordinary life, especially the bills.

As Nan struggled to hold everything together, the bailiffs were knocking at the door.
Meanwhile, another blow landed when Linda had a brain haemorrhage at the age of 15. She recovered, although the condition that caused it did eventually kill her.

Getty Images

Colin Firth with Patti

By the time Charmaine left home to train as a midwife in Bristol in 1980, she suspected her parents’ marriage wouldn’t survive. Nan was devastated when Eric met Patti and left to be with her a few months later.

After Eric left, Charmaine and Linda cut off contact with him.

Charmaine
said: “It was hard but we wanted to concentrate on our mum. Dad had made life very tough for her. She deserved better.”

It
wasn’t until Linda died in 1993, at the age of 46, that Charmaine saw Eric again. She said: “I stood at my sister’s graveside with my mum on one side and my dad on the other. Afterwards, he asked if I’d meet him sometimes for a cup of tea. So I did, every 18 months or so, although it was often very difficult and we hardly knew what to say to one another.”

Part of the fallout from her parents’ marriage was that Charmaine vowed never to marry. Instead, she devoted herself to her mother’s needs.

She said: “I felt my dad hadn’t cared for her properly so I wanted to do that.”

Nan died in 2003.

Charmaine
added: “After that, there was just me and dad. He was living in Berwick
and I’d drive down a few times a year. It was never easy because he still never talked about his feelings but at least we were in touch.”

Today,
Charmaine is 56. Though she swore she would never marry, she did in 2007. Being courageous enough to embark on a new life with Henry is, she
says, proof that she – just like Eric in the film – has emerged from the black cloud of torture that engulfed so much of her life. Her strong
Christian faith and counselling have helped her to move on.

The
film has brought her a new friend in its screenwriter, Frank Cottrell Boyce, who spent a lot of time with Eric while he was putting the script
together.